Beginners’ Latin

New lunchtime club introduces Seniors to the language of Ancient Rome.

Thornton has started a new co-curricular club this half-term to give Seniors a window into one of the world’s most ancient and prominent languages. By learning key nouns and verbs used throughout the Roman Empire, the idea is that students will gain an understanding of the ancestor of modern Romance languages and be better placed to identify the origins of many Spanish, French and English words.

In the first lesson, Mr Cooper talked the girls through a typical family set-up, focusing on one particular family who lived and died in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. ‘Everything we know about these people comes from the moment they were buried in the ashes from Mount Vesuvius and preserved,’ he explained.

Students learnt about Metella, the mother, Caecilius, the father, and Quintus the son (the fifth boy in translation), plus their slave, cook and dog.

They assembled key words to create a short story about the family members and their movements in the garden, study and kitchen, for example. They also did a virtual tour of what this family’s house would have looked like more than 1,000 years ago.